


The Torrance Streak

by Sheogorath



Category: The Shining - Stephen King
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Canonical Character Death, Canonical Child Abuse, Drug Abuse, Gen, Pastiche, Psychic Abilities, Violent Rape of a Child (Few Details), canonical violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-17
Updated: 2014-06-17
Packaged: 2018-02-05 01:10:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1799968
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sheogorath/pseuds/Sheogorath
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An unofficial companion story to <i>The Shining</i> and <i>Doctor Sleep</i> that takes a deeper look at Jack Torrance's history to examine the possible causes of his alcoholism.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Torrance Streak

**Author's Note:**

> So I'm reading Doctor Sleep for the second time since purchasing it late last month, and it made me think, 'What if the Shining has a genetic basis and Jack himself had it?' Hence this fic.  
> BTW, I gave Jack Torrance's mother a name for this fic since it's never given in the canon, and her maiden name is King in honour of the original author.

## The Torrance Streak.

After pouring himself a bowlful of cereal, John Daniel Torrance then looked around for a dish towel, folding his hands in his lap when he couldn't see one. Sighing heavily, his mother, Alice Rebecca King Torrance, got one out of the drawer where they were kept and gave it to him, sighing again as he wrapped it around the milk carton before picking it up with both hands.

"I don't even understand why you do that, Johnny," she said.

"It's because he's stupid!" Becky and Mike, two of his older siblings said simultaneously, but his eldest brother, Brett, stated, "It's because he doesn't want to touch the pictures of the children on the carton. He's scared of them."

This was not actually true, however. John wasn't scared of the children themselves, the reason he did not want to touch their photographs was that the previous year, his finger had brushed the picture of a pretty brown-haired girl with green eyes, and he had immediately been an unwilling witness as she was dragged into a brown sedan, then torn open on her abductor's monstrously large pee-pee before her body was thrown into a Dumpster in an alleyway as if it was only so much trash. Ever since that time, he sometimes woke up screaming from the nightmares the scenes had caused, and he could not bring himself to make contact with any of the other pictures just in case they had the same effect.

Just then, the children's father, Mark Anthony Torrance, came into the kitchen, and they all fell silent as he sat in front of the plate of eggs, bacon, and grits at his place and began to eat.

"Burnt the bacon again, woman," he remarked when he had finished, giving Alice a slap that seemed just as casual as his words had sounded, but which left the whole side of her face reddened. "Make sure not to do it again. You know I can't work without the proper fuel. You four, if I hear you've been getting in your mother's way again..."

He walked out with the threat unfinished, but all four of his children knew that he wouldn't need to hear anything about the eldest three to find an excuse for walloping them, and the youngest would escape a thrashing simply because of the time Mark had tried and suddenly found himself pinned against the wall by an invisible force, his then three-year-old son cowering on the floor with his arms over his head.

Just then, Mark walked back into the kitchen, remarking, "Forgot something," then grabbed a six pack of Schlitz from the fridge.

As her husband finally left for work this time, Alice rested her head against her folded arms on the table and began to weep silently. It was going to be a bad day.

✱   ✱   ✱

Over the following years, John was somehow able to get by. His father had not dared to strike him for about four years, then things got even better after he began hearing about a 'miracle drug' called meprobamate and discovered that his mother had been prescribed it. This dampened his ability to connect with the lost children so successfully that he was able to touch milk cartons directly again and suffer no scenes of any nature, but it also left him without the ability to defend himself, and he was forced to sit by and watch as his father beat his mother nearly to death with a cane, screaming all the time that she was a "fucking bitch" and a "filthy whore". When Alice Torrance later claimed that she had fallen down the stairs, her youngest son was filled with such disgust that he vowed not to waste time and effort trying to help her ever again. His father could kill his wife if that's what she wanted. She had already failed to defend John when his father had beaten him two years previously during an infomercial for some kind of health aid, a man's voice cheerily proclaiming, "What you see is what you'll be..."

The next time Mark tried to beat his youngest son, John looked at him and threatened, "If you so much as touch me, Dad, I won't stop at holding you against the walll, I'll push you right through it and tell the police you did it when they show up. Just because I chose not to stop you when I was seven, doesn't mean I'll let you beat me ever again."

Seeing the expression on the ten-year-old boy's face, Mark understood that he had inherited the mental disturbance he drank to block out, and he knew real fear for the first time since he had first held a beer in his hand.

"Sweet fucking Christ!" he muttered as he stomped from his child's bedroom, slamming the door so hard that every wall of the house shook from the force.

✱   ✱   ✱

During high school some years later, John wasn't sure exactly when, he discovered alcohol, and he quickly ditched his mother's prescription drugs in favour of beer because it had the same dampening effect while leaving him alert to real danger. Then, while at Franklin-Pierce College, which he had entered on a scholarship, he discovered the joys of whiskey and bourbon.

"Scotch on the rocks," he would sometimes say when breezing into a bar with all the confidence of a legal drinker, although he was only nineteen, then once he was good and plastered, the chattering in his head finally quiet again, he would stagger back to his room in a boarding house, praying that his landlady was sound asleep.

This pattern continued throughout university, by which time John was known as Jack, and since he was now able to be carded and still get served, he had drinking buddies in many bars and was the friend of nearly all those who worked in liquor stores.

✱   ✱   ✱

A year before losing his teaching position for pounding the snot nosed brat who slashed his tires, Jack turned into his father and broke his son's arm, which scared him stone cold sober in seconds.

"I'm sorry, Doc. I'm real sorry," he sobbed into his son's ear over and over as his wife drove them all to the emergency room. "How can you ever forgive me?"

Jack had been so angry with Danny when he had discovered that his important work papers were torn up and covered with beer from an open bottle that he himself had left out, but the most he should have done was tell the boy off. Shouting was over the top, and physical chastisement was out of the question when nobody had been injured, so to have broken Danny's arm sent huge pangs of pain and guilt through Jack that he never wanted to suffer again.

"Wendy," Jack said. "I'm not going to drink again from now on, and if you ever see me so much as open a bottle of beer, you can divorce me. I mean that."

The car rushed on through the sunlit Vermont streets, Winifred Dowell Torrance smiling sadly as she continued to drive. She would hold Jack to that, no child deserved such pain and fright for simply playing, no matter _what_ their play led to.

✱   ✱   ✱

Two years later, as she dragged her broken and bleeding body through the snow outside the Overlook Hotel, Wendy wished she had left her husband and taken Danny to live somewhere else when Jack kept breaking his promise, each time rolling in even more drunk than the time before, but then one evening, he had suddenly quit drinking with no explanation other than rambling on about a kid's bike and Danny having been run over, and had not touched a drop since. At least until coming to Colorado, that was, although Wendy had no idea where he had got the booze which was obviously fuelling his rampage since he had brought none with him and she knew for a fact that the bar was dry because it was the hotel's off-season.

It was not just sadness that filled two of the survivors in the snow cat as it drove through the darkened streets of Sidewinder, but also a sense of relief. Yes, Jack Torrance had lost his life in the flames that were gradually becoming lost to their view, but at least the evil that had pervaded the building since its completion in 1909 was finally gone. Or so Dick Hallorann and Wendy thought...

**Author's Note:**

> Copyright © 2014 Romersa's Protégé. Individuals and groups are free to copy and share this work for all purposes except large scale distribution, subject to credit being given and any derivatives being released under the same or a similar licence. All other rights reserved.  
> Inspired by and featuring information from 'The Shining' and 'Doctor Sleep'; Copyright © 1976 and 2011 Stephen King. All rights reserved.


End file.
